US retailers collapsing at an alarming rate

Yeah but the point is that the closing of physical retail stores just signals a shift in the way people shop, not that their capacity to shop is shrinking, which would indicate a collapse of the consumer base. A better analogy would be all the buggy-makers going out of business when cars become popular. People aren't losing the capacity or need to get around, technology has just changed the way the do it.

The employees lose the capacity to shop. When a sector collapses, everything gets fucky.

Housing prices ended up demolishing banks, retail, Auto sales, everything. Fuck, the price of houses in the US changed and almost brought down the governments of Spain, Portugal and Greece.

The modern capitalist economy is such an interdependent clusterfuck that any one sector failing becomes a single point of failure for the whole thing.

Making cars required workers. Not algorithms.

Never Forget the LTV.

That's true I suppose, but presumably as the retail industry collapses then industries supporting online shopping may be able to pick up some of the slack. I'm not saying that a recession isn't coming, just that I'm more sceptical.

We've pretty much been living through the second Long Depression now.

Amazon warehouses to take like 12 employees to run what would make up hundreds of stores for all the inventory they have. That is how Amazon has been making so much money.

Two reasons for this, imho.

The first is online shopping, which others have already brought up.

The other, which is kind of interesting if true, is that there seems to be a decline in mall culture. Malls were the cool hang-out places for kids and young adults in the 80s and 90s, and that doesn't seem to be as true today.

qz.com/197740/american-teens-dont-hang-out-at-malls-anymore-they-eat-at-restaurants/

That article is just about teens, but I think it also applies to people in their 20s or maybe even older who want to walk around the mall and look at girls or whatever on a rainy day. People go in shop, maybe eat, and then leave. Malls are no longer considered fun outside of that.

Curious if it's part of a growing disgust with consumer culture.

If this is really mostly due to on-line shopping (nuance here ), we're getting a first taste of a new kind of technological unemployment.

Used to be that if a factory downsized thanks to robots, people would flow into the service sector - but retail is the biggest service sector! These are jobs that will maybe not be so easily replaced. Even if this wave of bankruptcies doesn't cause a crisis an sich, it is a portent of things to come.

...

Starting to feel like a genius tbh.

Under capitalism, automation actually makes your life worse.

By now it's Socialism or Extinction, buckos. Capitalism proved to be surprisingly resilient so far but MUH FREE MARKET cannot and will not fix the climate going haywire.

Even Socialism is but a band-aid. Immanentize the eschaton.

They will be punished by being reincarnated as insects on another planet. We will be the ones who step on them. They need Buddha, but they'll never have him.

Little not of column A, little bit of column B. We have:

1. The population becoming poorer.
2. The rise of online shopping.
3. The decline of consumer/mall culture.
4. Retailers closing.

Every single of those factors is a cause and an effect of the others to some extent. Look beyond retail/malls and you'll see those feedback loops happening everywhere across the economy.

Shit's about to crash hard, the only big question is how fast.

""""""bankrupt""""""

Hungry ghosts, that's what they'll become. They are already behaving like them in this life.

Edgy.

here we go again

Oh don't you worry, they'll all be hired in the New Amazon Megasprawlwarehouse.

amazon hubs are huge ass structures with hundreds of employees inside. I don't know where you guys get these things, every article and report i've seen about amazon warehouses looked like some sort of chinese sweatshop.
they have hundreds of people per plant and they're CONSTANTLY hiring.

Yeah, but what are all the jobs going to come from to replace the loss of income for the thousands of people affected by all these store closings

Online retailers hire less people than physical stores, there will be a net loss of jobs. Blockbuster wasn't as big a deal because it was a very specific sector, and hired mainly teenagers. Broader and bigger retail stores like JCPenny or Sears have older employees with families who are already making shitty pay, and now they'll be thrust into an already over saturated market. If they get another job, they might have to start all over at the bottom as companies tend to hire low level managers from within and not from outside.